1967 October 2

Thurgood Marshall Joins Supreme Court – First African-American Justice

 

Civil rights attorney Thurgood Marshall joined the Supreme Court on this day as the first African-American justice in the history of the Court.

Before joining the Supreme Court Marshall was one of the giants of the civil rights movement. He became head of the new NAACP Legal Defense Fund on October 11, 1939, and in that position was responsible for most of the important civil rights cases of his era, including most notably Brown v. Board of Education on May 17, 1954, which ruled that the principle of “separate but equal” was unconstitutional. He was also responsible for the civil rights cases that led up to Brown and cases that followed it.

Marshall was appointed to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in 1961 and then as Solicitor General of the United States in 1965.

President Lyndon Johnson was deeply committed to appointing Marshall as the first African-American Supreme Court justice. There was just one problem: there was no vacancy on the court in 1967. So LBJ engineered a classic bit of LBJ maneuvering to create a vacancy. First, he talked Nicholas Katzenbach to resign as Attorney General and accept a position as Undersecretary State. Then he let it be known that he wanted to appoint Ramsey Clark, the son of Supreme Court justice Tom Clark, as Attorney General. He know full well that many people would see serious conflicts with Justice Tom Clark ruling on his son’s cases. So he talked with Justice Clark about the problem, playing to the judge’s family pride in having his son as attorney general. The elder Clark wanted his son as AG and so agreed to retire from the court. This created the vacancy that Thurgood Marshall could and did fill. (Read the whole story in Wil Haygood, Showdown, below.)

Southern segregationists in the Senate posed a problem for Marshall’s confirmation, even though liberal Democrats and moderate Republicans commanded a majority. President Johnson again brought all of his lobbying skill to bear on the issue and eventually convinced 20 segregationist opponents not to vote at all. And so Marshall’s appointment to the court was confirmed by a vote 0f 69-11 (rather than 69-31 if all senators had voted).

Marshall retired from the Court in 1991 after serving for 24 years, and he died in 1993. One of his former law clerks, Elena Kagan became the third woman to serve on the Court.

Don’t miss: Wil Haygood, Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America (2015)

Read: Mark V. Tushnet, Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936 – 1961 (2004).

Watch a long-lost interview with Marshall: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoPLitU6jVg

Visit the Thurgood Marshall Memorial Statue, Lawyer’s Hall, Annapolis, Maryland:
http://www.msa.md.gov/msa/stagser/s1259/121/6259/html/0001.html

Read Marshall’s FBI file: http://vault.fbi.gov/Thurgood%20Marshall

Visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture here

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